What is driving up number of road crashes?

Have you noticed how many serious car crashes there have been in the news over the past couple of months?

There have been so many of them, taking place all over the country. I can’t remember when there has been such carnage on the roads in such a short space of time. Perhaps it just appears that way because the media have decided to give more prominence to car crashes, but I really don’t think so.

Something appears to be going seriously wrong with road safety within the UK.

A good example of the carnage taking place, is indicated by listing a selection of the fatal collisions that happened just last week, two dead Staffordshire, two dead Norfolk, four dead Bicester, two dead Yorkshire, three dead Buckinghamshire and so on. The deaths are happening on motorways, A roads and even in town centres.

By coincidence as I am writing this column, there has just been a local news flash announcing that the air ambulance is flying to a serious incident in East Lancashire where four people have suffered major trauma following a rush hour smash. What’s happening?

Regrettably, drink driving is still involved in far too many fatal crashes. This paper published a lovely photograph last week of a smiling dad from Leyland, cuddling a baby with a smiling mum. Unfortunately, when you read the story, the dad had died because he crashed his car, while two and a half times over the drink drive limit.

A child is going to grow up without their father, because he had a few too many pints. A sad waste of life, yet there are still those willing to take exactly the same risk.

Most of the cars on the roads these days tend to have more safety equipment than ever before and can stop quicker, yet there appear to be more pile-ups with more casualties.

I think some of the problems are that a basic car can be as quick as sports cars of yesteryear and there are more chunky SUVs on the road.

Some are driving quicker, more aggressively, while being distracted by mobile phones, iPods or some other apparently essential electronic device. Of course there are also less traffic bobbies to deter bad driving.

People may have become too relaxed and confident when driving modern cars. The simple answer is for people to slow down and just focus on their driving!